New Research Shows How Kundalini Meditation can help heal childhood Trauma!

New Research Shows How Kundalini Meditation can help heal childhood Trauma!

Young mothers at Youth Service in Philadelphia learned yoga while they were incarcerated as part of a pilot study by the Georgetown Law Center on poverty and inequality.

As a teenager, Rocsana Enriquez ran away from home frequently to escape fights with her mother and sexual abuse from her stepfather.

She got involved with street gangs and cycled in and out of juvenile detention.

While she was incarcerated in the San Mateo County juvenile justice system, she started to learn yoga.

It became an outlet for her anger and an antidote to the deep insecurity she felt.

Before she got into a fight, she reminded herself to take a deep breath.

A new report by the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown Law School shows that yoga programs can be particularly effective at helping girls who are incarcerated cope with the effects of trauma.

Such programs would be a cost-effective way to help one of the country’s most vulnerable groups heal and improve their lives, the report says.

The US government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration recently recognized a trauma-sensitive yoga curriculum as an evidence-based intervention.

The report references more than 40 published studies that have shown positive benefits of yoga and meditation and includes the results of two pilot programs that offered yoga to girls in residential detention programs in Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Outcomes of those pilot programs included fewer fights in the ward, fewer requests for medications, and fewer medical complaints.

Some girls who took part in the program came forward and reported past sexual violence that they had not shared previously, according to the report.

Yoga and meditation training are being introduced increasingly in schools as well as detention centers to treat the kinds of traumatic experiences and chronic stress that youth and adults living in poverty experience disproportionately.

The report says that girls in the juvenile justice system nationwide would benefit from a systemic approach with stable funding and from yoga programs that are tailored specifically to their needs as girls and trauma survivors.